Online Reporter
Miriam Tose Majome-Correspondent
For generations, rural land has been more than just soil to Zimbabweans.
It has been a guarantee of survival —our unwritten form of social security. It is the place families return to when city life becomes unbearable.
For decades, people have moved from rural areas to cities in search of better lives. It is a familiar story across generations: chasing work, better schools, or the promise of modern life.
Yet even now, about two-thirds of Zimbabwe’s population still live in rural areas, while roughly a third live in towns.
The majority remain tied to the land, but that bond is weakening. As more people move away from their rural homes, country’s natural safety net begins to tear.
Anyone who walks through our cities can see how fragile urban life has become. Overcrowded suburbs and sprawling informal settlements all tell the same story.
Many people come to town full of hope, but find a few jobs, poor services and unaffordable housing.
Urban poverty is not just about empty pockets. It is about people trapped in a space that can no longer carry them, with no home to fall back on when things go wrong.
Towns cannot sustain everyone such that during colonial times, Africans were forced to carry passes to justify their presence in towns.
That system was cruel and dehumanising, but it recognised one hard reality: cities have limits. Today, there are no restrictions and people keep coming thereby creating urban overcrowding.
The numbers tell their own story.
Around 67 percent of Zimbabweans still live in rural areas, but the urban population keeps growing every year. The cost of living in cities far outpaces incomes.
Rent, food, transport and school fees consume what little people earn. When families sell their rural homes, they give up their only fallback. Homelessness, petty crime and informal trading become their daily reality.
On the outskirts of Harare, Bulawayo and Mutare, this crisis is easy to see. Areas such as Caledonia, Epworth and Chitungwiza have become home to thousands who came seeking opportunity, but ended up in makeshift shelters without water, roads or sanitation.
Many would have stayed in their rural homes if there had been proper amenities there. Instead, they find themselves surviving from day to day in conditions that rob them of dignity.
Upgrading rural amenities is a national priority so that they offer offered reasonable comfort and opportunity and make migration to cities a choice, rather than an act of desperation. People would still have their rural homes, farms and networks as a safety net.
That balance is what has always kept people grounded.
The growing campaign for title deeds in communal areas must be approached with caution. On the surface, it sounds like progress, but in practice, it could destroy the very security it seeks to formalise.
Once communal land becomes private property that can be sold, many will sell it out of financial pressure, and entire families will lose their rural base forever. When that happens, homelessness is no longer an urban problem but a national one.
Urban poverty is not only an economic issue — it is a social warning. It reflects a deeper loss of connection to the land and to the balance that once sustained us.
When we forget that the countryside was always meant to anchor the nation, we end up with towns bursting at the seams and rural areas left to decay.
The solution does not lie in cities. It lies in rediscovering and rebuilding life in the rural heart of Zimbabwe. The countryside must remain part of our survival system, not a forgotten past.
If we lose that, we lose far more than land. We lose stability, dignity and the quiet assurance that no Zimbabwean should ever be completely without a home.
Miriam Tose Majome is a lawyer. She writes in her personal capacity and can be contacted on [email protected]
